Research quality up despite cuts

Despite repeated cuts to research funding, the Excellence in Research for Australia audit shows research quality continues to grow.

We are getting more research, of higher quality, when universities say the research funding squeeze is doing untold damage.

Figure out this paradox. On the one hand, we have universities making the case over and over again that the many cuts made to research funding by successive federal governments are a grave danger to the quality of research and pose a major economic risk to the nation.

For example, in December last year, after the latest government cut of $330 million to research funding, Universities Australia said Australians would be robbed of “lifesaving treatments, research to help prevent floods and bushfires, and advances in almost every aspect of people’s lives”.

But following the announcement last week of the official triennial audit of research quality — Excellence in Research for Australia — universities proudly cited the results, which show that the quality of their research continues to grow.

ERA divides up research into 162 disciplines, and each univer­sity is judged on its performance in each category in which it has sufficient research output.

It turns out that 69 per cent of the individual research disciplines were rated at above or well above world standard. The comparable figure for the previous ERA round three years ago was 62 per cent.

What is the solution to this conundrum? Is it that universities are concentrating their limited resources into doing a smaller quantity of higher quality research?

The ERA report does not support that view. It says the volume of research outputs (that is, the number of academic papers and other non-traditional outputs such as events, live performances, recordings and creative works) went up by 17 per cent in the past three years.

So we are getting more research, of higher quality, when universities say the research funding squeeze is doing untold damage.

How do we make sense of this? Part of the answer is that, while the level of university funding has been cut from the level that had been expected, it is not actually falling. According to the official data, money received by the universities for research was up 11 per cent in the period covered by the latest ERA report compared with the one three years before. That comfortably adjusts for inflation.

A further clue is in the number of research staff reported by ERA. It’s down 7 per cent in the latest report compared with the earlier one, which indicates that there has been a boost in research productivity.

Of course, none of this brings us closer to being able to say with confidence what the best level of spending for university research is, or how funding should be distributed between research fields to achieve optimal results.

It is true that, overall, Australia spends way less on research and development than other comparable countries and this is mainly because of a lack of spend by business, not universities. There’s a good case to be made that the best area to increase research spending is in projects closely linked to business innovation, which will lead to the development of new competitive industries.